how the months end

We've already reached the end of another month. I don't know where the come from. I turn around on Valentine's Day, and we're already in a bar full of crowded French people singing Celtic songs & chugging Guinness. I've reached the point in our France-dwelling phase where I get sad turning the calendar. I don't want July to come. I want France to somehow overlap the United States, so that I never have to leave & never have to miss my family.

Reasons why the end of March is a good thing:
1. I have put away my winter coat & intend never to get it out again. It is SUNNY & glorious. Right when I began typing about the weather, a bird started singing. Yellow buds are lining the streets–in flowerbeds, on trees, stuck to windowsills. This means that my time between classes is spent sitting on the campus lawn with my co-workers. I love my job.

2. We have two big trips with friends planned for April–one to the Vosges, a mountainous area near us, & one to Montpellier, where I will finally be reunited with my friend Jon. We traveled to France for the first time together, with a horrible stop in Montpellier just before returning home. This time will be different, as he's living there now & we will NOT be trapped in a hostel.

3. PAY DAY.

Joe & I are far from living paycheck to paycheck, but we've set up a good amount of savings–a portion of each month's euros being reserved for our return home. We don't like dipping into that. So as the end of the month draws near, we start to see the back of the cupboards. Today, the cupboard contains dried figs, Maggi sauce, vinegar, oil, crackers & honey.

"When in France, do as the French" has become a bit of a joking motto for my blog posts. When speaking about food, it largely applies. We go to the grocery more frequently, buy more fresh things & have a lot more dairy. This means that the fridge holds celery, radishes, pasta sauce, carrot salad, milk, five containers of "fromage frais" (a bit like sour cream & yogurt mixed together), another cheese, & some miscellaneous sauces. Not a lot to work with, but a rather French line-up of ingredients.

So why not make a pizza? Yesterday, we did a lot better putting together a normal-looking pizza. Today, it's morbier, radishes, onion, mushrooms & a yeast-free crust. We need to go grocery shopping. This is only partially due to our determination to make our budget stretch. (I honestly can't remember the last time we did full-out grocery shopping.)

Our schedules, though not overly full, are rather opposite. Joe works in the mornings. I work in the afternoons & into the evening. We've had a lot of social goings-on, & we're feeling worn down. So when it's sunny & the window is open & we have no obligations until 2 p.m, it's hard to get motivated to leave the apartment. We're working on our individual to-do lists (reading, cleaning, statistics, staring at a pile of laundry that needs to be washed) & enjoying have a gorgeous morning together.

"We'll be out of food tomorrow. We'll go in the afternoon. We'll go between classes. We'll grab things from a shop on the way home," we tell ourselves while settling back into our novels. I'll admit it: I miss being a student, when I could just skip classes when the weather was this perfect, or when "group meetings" could be held on a restaurant patio with a pitcher of beer.

I would just have class outside with my five students that turn up... but somehow I don't think France is as down with that as my humanities department was in the States. How do we know unless we test the limits though, right?

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